The PURELL® brand has become a cornerstone of our 75-year-old Family Enterprise. While PURELL® Instant Hand Sanitizer was not developed until 42 years after our founding, it has changed our business and our world. Our innovation has grown from just one product – PURELL Hand Sanitizer – to a Total Solution for away-from-home and at-home germ management. While it’s been said that PURELL Hand Sanitizer was an overnight success, the story of how our PURELL brand became America’s most popular hand sanitizer is one that took years of unwavering vision, grit, and resilience with many learnings along the way.
PURELL Hand Sanitizer was born out of the observation that people couldn’t always get to a sink to wash their hands and the need to solve a very real and important human problem – preventing the transmission of germs that can cause illness. The idea for PURELL Hand Sanitizer was brought to us by a prospective foodservice customer. A hospital in Chicago had been purchasing our DERMAPRO™ Isopropyl alcohol gel, a product that was designed only for hospital emergency use.
A nurse from that hospital brought a bottle of DERMAPRO home and showed it to her husband, who worked at a large foodservice company. He thought it would be a nice addition to their operations to help stop the spread of germs when workers couldn’t leave their stations to get to a sink. This foodservice customer approached Joe Kanfer, the CEO and Chairman of GOJO at the time, for DERMAPRO, but rather than sell a product to the restaurant that was not suited for everyday use, Joe saw an opportunity to develop something greater.
With this challenge, our formulators and microbiologists spent a year in the lab developing a product that could be used every day, not just in emergencies. It had to have the right balance of efficacy (would kill germs), safety (was gentle on workers’ hands), and appeal to users (had great aesthetics – fragrance and skin feel). The result was the introduction of the first PURELL Instant Hand Sanitizer in 1988. With the introduction of PURELL Hand Sanitizer, we created the category of “hand sanitizer.” Before this, there was no way to clean one’s hands without soap and water!
At GOJO, we make it a point to be intentional with every aspect of product design – including product names. Joe Kanfer shared, “We got the name PURELL because my team didn’t like the name I chose. I was quite excited about the new category, and I chose the name Flash – because I thought it worked fast and that would be a great name. Sharon Guten, Senior Advisor/Applied Behavior Sciences Vice President, came to me and said, ‘Joe, could you give me a couple of days to come up with a better name?’ She put a little team together and came back and said, ‘I think we should call it PURELL. It’s not how fast it works – that’s functional. It’s how it makes you feel.’ And that’s how it got the name PURELL.”
While we at GOJO immediately recognized the value of PURELL Hand Sanitizer, the challenge that followed was in having other people understand that there was a solution as effective as handwashing and one that was needed when soap and water were not accessible. Adoption of PURELL didn’t come easily, and it didn’t come quickly.
PURELL® Hand Sanitizer was initially intended for the healthcare and foodservice industries, but handwashing was ingrained in people’s minds as the only way to clean hands. Early adopters, like Wegmans in 1992, were forced to take PURELL dispensers off their walls because health inspection guidelines accepted only handwashing as the way to ensure sanitation. And, though samples were hugely popular among nurses and GOJO team members, instant hand sanitizer was not widely used or understood (though the passion of these early adopters inspired us to launch PURELL as a consumer product through retailers in 1997). For the first 10 years after the invention of the PURELL brand, GOJO gave away more in samples than it made in sales, but patience and conviction proved to go a long way in the success of PURELL.
For the next decade, GOJO worked closely with hospitals and researchers who were conducting studies and building evidence of the safety, efficacy, and convenience of alcohol-based hand sanitizers to reduce hospital-associated infections. When an infection outbreak occurred in 2001 at a Hospital in Boston, PURELL Hand Sanitizer was used to help control it, further demonstrating the real value of alcohol-based hand sanitizers. A similar outbreak at a university was also controlled with PURELL Hand Sanitizer, and the outcome of installing PURELL dispensers during this time at the university led to a surprising result – increased hand sanitizing and increased handwashing. The assumption that hand sanitizing would replace handwashing seemed to be wrong; rather, people who hand sanitized became more aware of the need to get their hands clean and actually washed more than they had before!
All this hard work eventually paid off when, in 2002, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after reviewing the significant number of clinical outcome studies, revised its guidelines for hand hygiene in healthcare settings, making alcohol-based hand sanitizers the first measure of hand hygiene, unless hands were visibly soiled.
What resulted next was what many at GOJO refer to as “the race to the walls” -- as in hospital walls. GOJO worked with hospitals around the country to install PURELL dispensers aimed at helping keep both staff and patients healthy and well.
We built the consumer business in parallel with our B2B business, believing that the brand PURELL would be stronger if both end users and institutions used and valued it. With the liftoff of the B2B business following the CDC guidelines, we decided to focus on that part of the business and believed selling the PURELL B2C to a strong consumer marketer would be the best path to success. GOJO sold the consumer portion of the PURELL business to Pfizer in 2004, and Pfizer’s entire consumer portfolio, including PURELL, Listerine, and Neosporin, was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2006. But in 2010, GOJO bought PURELL back from Johnson & Johnson, reintegrating B2B and B2C.
The next decade GOJO did what we do best – continued to challenge ourselves to create first-to-market innovations, which included iconic PURELL dispenser design, the first third-party green-certified hand sanitizer, PURELL Hand Sanitizing Wipes, and The PURELL SOLUTION, which includes a comprehensive, multicategory portfolio of hygiene solutions, including PURELL Surface Spray, PURELL Healthy Soap, and PURELL Surface Wipes.
The invention of PURELL Hand Sanitizer resulted in the creation of an entirely new category, a category-defining product, and the birth of our consumer business. PURELL is now an everyday solution that has truly changed how the world stays well, especially during emergency situations, like pandemics and natural disasters. PURELL is the top brand that people have increased usage of during the second year of the pandemic, according to MBLM’s Brand Intimacy COVID Study, a study of brands based on emotions during the pandemic. Today, millions of people around the globe rely on PURELL products to help stay healthy and well every single day, and we are both humbled by and proud of this. It is the continuing hard work and creativity of GOJO team members that make it possible for us to deliver on our GOJO Purpose of Saving Lives and Making Lives Better Through Well-Being Solutions with PURELL products.